Plan: General Background. " The Angry Young Man"

Charles Percy Snow (1905-1980)
Sir Charles Percy Snow was born in Leicester in 1905. By the end of the twenties he graduated from the University of Cambridge and went on working there in the field of molecular physics. Snow's academic life continued until the beginning of World War II.
Charles Percy Snow began writing in the thirties. "The Search", the first of his novels, was published in 1934. Six years later, in 1940, appeared his novel "Strangers and Brothers" which then became the title of a whole sequence of novels written in the forties, fifties and sixties. The second novel of the sequence en­titled "The Light and the Dark", was published in 1947. It was succeeded by the novels "Time of Hope" (1949) and "The Masters" (1951). Later on "The New Men" (1954), "Homecom­ings" (1956), "The Conscience of the Rich" (1959) and "The Affair" (1960) were added to it, but the sequence was not yet completed. "Corridors of Powers", the latest of all the novels already written, appeared in 1964. The author himself divided all the books of the sequence into two main groups. The first group is called "novels of private experience" and includes "Time of Hope" (1947) and "Homecomings" (1956). All the rest belong to the group of "novels of conditioned experience". The main hero of all the books is Louis Eliot, scientist and statesman, this is why English literary critics call them "the Louis Eliot sequence", in the so-called "novels of private experience"', Snow describes the life of Louis Eliot in his youth ("Time of Hope") and in the middle age ("Homecomings"), while in other novels the lives of his friends, relatives and acquaintances as seen through his eyes. In general. Snow makes an impressive study of English society in the twen­tieth century. True to the method of modern realism, the writer places the representatives of different classes and social circles in the center of his artistic attention.
Being a scientist by profession, he managed to create convincing pictures of the relations between intellectuals and the upper classes, his description of the social and political struggle contained certain points of criticism of the contemporary society. As a realist, Charles Percy Snow mainly gives a generalizing pic­ture of English society of yesterday and today, of its most characteristic and typical trends and features. This does not pre­vent him, however, from being a master of individual psychology. In some of his works (especially "Time of Hope" and "Home­comings") the inner life of the characters is brilliantly disclosed. However, being traditional in descriptions, Snow was a subtle and sensitive artist of landscape.